Music industry to raid unis over piracy

Page Tools

Related

The music recording industry is set to raid several Australian
universities by the end of February to ferret out illicit trading
of copyrighted digital material.

The move is part of a globally co-ordinated strategy in the week
before Christmas in which police and lawyers shut down European
websites holding links to files that could help people locate
pirated material.

Michael Speck, the lead investigator for Australian recording
labels' Music Industry Piracy Investigations, said the planned
raids were to protect licensed online sellers of music and other
copyrighted content by "clearing out the illegal brushwood".
Although he would not name the universities he was targeting, he
said they were "across Australia".

Cases by the music industry against the universities of Sydney,
Melbourne and Tasmania are also likely to resume about the same
time as the raids.

Mr Speck said several universities had taken no action against
alleged pirates, "despite our good faith negotiations to minimise
infringing activity".

Copyright industries are engaged in a globally co-ordinated
attack to cut down the illicit spread of material across
"peer-to-peer" (P2P) networks, in which users directly transfer
files such as music, software, films, TV shows and electronic books
between each other.

Such P2P traffic is estimated to account for 17 per cent of
Australian internet use in October, costing businesses as much as
$60 million in bandwidth charges, according to Melbourne-based
network management provider Exinda Networks. The likely cost to
copyright holders is many times more, the industry says.

An October study by Dr Johan Pouwelse at Delft University of
Technology in the Netherlands found more than 1.2 million people
requested files each day from Bit Torrent, one of the most popular
pirate networks at the centre of last month's raids in Europe.

The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the
major film studios, signalled its intention to get tough with
flagrant abusers of its copyrights on December 14, filing civil
lawsuits in the US and Britain against the operators of Bit
Torrent, eDonkey and Direct Connect servers.

That week, police and lawyers acting for the association in
France, the Netherlands and Finland seized equipment and detained
more than 30 people connected to websites that host the index files
that often point to illicitly shared copyrighted material held on
users' personal computers.

Mr Speck said there were "a number of targets in Australia or in
the region" soon to be shut down in similar fashion.

Early last month, universities, through the Australian
Vice-Chancellors' Committee, signed a $17.5 million deal with
copyright collections agency Screenrights to allow students and
staff to legally share film and television content over
institutions' networks for the next five years. Australian
universities spend about $20 million a year on copyright licensing,
says the committee.

Despite this, Mr Speck said "universities had shown a complete
disregard for music copyright". The music industry maintains that
students use university networks to illegally swap material.
Vice-chancellors' committee chief executive John Mullarvey
countered that the music industry saw universities as a convenient
"cash cow".

The industry had unsuccessfully approached several universities
seeking to sign separate licensing contracts, he said.

"But it hasn't gone very far because of the constant action by
parts of the music industry in suing universities," Mr Mullarvey
said. "We don't see that as being conducive to reaching a
satisfactory agreement.

"We totally reject the accusations by Mr Speck. These have been
ongoing accusations by him over a number of years that are yet to
be proven despite legal action taken by the music industry against
a number of universities."

The piracy investigations group's proposed enforcement will
coincide with two cases before Australian courts due to resume at
the end of February and beginning of March, in which Vanuatu-based
Kazaa software maker Sharman and, separately, Sydney man Stephen
Cooper are alleged to have infringed the rights of intellectual
property owners.

But actions such as raiding websites or prosecuting P2P users
are unlikely to succeed in the short term, according to Exinda
Networks executive director Con Nikolouzakis. Mr Nikolouzakis said
P2P users would continue activities elsewhere.

Already piracy activity had shifted to sites not caught in last
month's European crackdown, with some dormant sites reactivating
after several years. And a new P2P technology, Exeem, is slated for
the new year, making it more difficult for copyright holders to
police networks.

"I think what (the industry) is trying to do is show their
presence and . . . (show) that they are not a soft target and try
to deter users," Mr Nikolouzakis said. "But at the end of the day
you can't stop the technology."